Imported Materials

Nubia, Egypt’s closest neighbor, was the most important source of gold. Egypt sought to control Nubia in part because of its gold (known in texts as the gold of “Wawat”). In the New Kingdom, when the Egyptians built temple towns as far upstream as the Fourth Cataract, Egypt was the main supplier of gold to the other Near Eastern kingdoms.

Amid all the glitter of Tutankhamen’s gold, only one dagger in his tomb has an iron blade. Hematite (the principal ore of iron ore) was found in Egypt and used for beads as early as the Predynastic Period, and iron ores exist in the Eastern and Western Deserts. The technology for large-scale iron production, however, did not develop until the late second millennium Bc, and not until the mid-first millennium Bc in Egypt. A major source of iron was in the far south of Nubia, between the Fifth and Sixth Nile Cataracts at the confluence of the Nile and Atbara Rivers. This was the region of ancient Meroe, an iron-producing kingdom that rivaled Egypt in Greco-Roman times.

Nubia was also the main corridor into Egypt for exotic raw materials, some of which may have been the products of transit trade from regions to the southeast. A land known as “Punt” in ancient Egyptian texts was probably in the region of Kassala in eastern Sudan and northward, where ebony and frankincense trees are still found. Italian archaeologist Rodolfo Fattovich, who excavated in the Kassala region in the 1980s and 1990s, has found archaeological evidence of storage facilities and seals used in long-distance trade with the Nile Valley in the mid-second millennium BC. Ebony wood from Punt was used in elite craft goods, such as a small child’s chair in Tutankhamen’s tomb, and incense was necessary for temple and mortuary rituals - and must have been consumed in huge quantities in ancient Egypt. Gums and other resins also came from the Punt region, as did elephant ivory and leopard skins, which were worn by some Egyptian priests. Exotic animals, such as baboons, monkeys, and giraffes, which were sometimes kept as royal pets in a palace zoo, also came from this region.

Obsidian, which when fractured forms a much sharper edge than chert, is found on both sides of the southern Red Sea and may have reached Egypt through Punt and Nubia.

Obsidian tools have been found in Predynastic burials, and in Dynastic times obsidian was used for beads and other small artifacts, including the pupils of eye inlays in statues.

The Sinai Peninsula to the east of Egypt was also an important source of raw materials, including turquoise used in jewelry from mines in the western Sinai. Larger copper mines than in the Eastern desert were located in the south-central Sinai at Wadi Maghara and in the vicinity of Serabit el-Khadim, and in the southern Negev desert at Timna.

From Lebanon and Syria came large timbers, especially cedar, but also fir and pine. Large timbers could not have been imported overland or towed by ships, but would have been imported in the hulls of large sea-going vessels. Large royal boats for foreign trade as well as traffic on the Nile were made of cedar and this was the most desirable wood for coffins. But oils and resins from foreign coniferous trees were also desirable in Egypt, especially for use in mummification.

Perfumed oil from Palestine first came to Egypt in later Predynastic times as did copper from mines in the Negev desert (especially Timna). In the 1st-Dynasty royal cemetery at Abydos, Flinders Petrie excavated a ramp leading to the tomb of King Semerkhet which was soaked about 1 meter deep with perfumed fat still pungent almost 5,000 years later. New Kingdom and later imports from southwest Asia included horses, silver, copper ingots (notably from Cyprus), oils, and various craft goods. Lapis lazuli, which was imported into Egypt already in Predynastic times, came though southwest Asia from mines in Badakhshan, in northeastern Afghanistan. This dark blue stone was used for beads and jewelry inlays, but its supply depended on many middlemen between Egypt and central Asia, and hence on the changing political relationships of these regions.

Although many of these imported raw materials were highly desired by royalty and the elite, none were basic necessities of daily life. For much of dynastic times foreign trade was controlled by the crown, and the exotic imported materials were not distributed among the peasant majority of the population. The crown sent expeditions to mines and quarries in the Eastern desert and, much less frequently, to Punt. Mining activity in the Sinai was also controlled by the state, as were parts of Nubia in the old, Middle, and New Kingdoms.